Chapter one: History
LEP historic files: Mages. Authorization: Captain Holly Short. Id code: 7302 Password:******** Accessing… done.
Two hundred years before the battle of Tailte, Fairy warlocks noticed something peculiar. When observing human behavior, they saw that some humans exhibited unusual properties, such as setting objects on fire if they thought about it hard enough. This often led the rest of the humans to use these people as firelighters, and made the warlocks assume that these mud men were somehow capable of using magic. They took some of them in to educate and research them. They found some new details, including how human magic was much different to that of the fairy people. For one thing, the humans needed special equipment to focus and control their power. A demon warlock by the name of Qwand made a device that could do this, and it was magically programmed to respond to voice cues and movement. It was programmable, too, enabling them to 'learn' new spells. The device was called the 'wand', in Qwand's honor. They were specially chosen sticks, taken form certain magical tree types, including oak, birch and myrtle. Qwand then put certain parts of magical creatures in the centre of the wands, including phoenix feathers and unicorn hair. The end result was a powerful, if temperamental, tool that was incredibly versatile. The original magical humans, or 'wizards/witches', were actually the ancestors of Salzar Slytherin, Godric Gryffindor, Rowena Ravenclaw and Helena Hufflepuff, the founders of Hogwarts.
When the Humans took it upon themselves to conquer the Fairies, the wizarding community split from that of the 'muggles', a term that originated from a mispronunciation of 'Mudder', which was a derisive Fairy term for Humans. The Wizards and witches numbered in the hundreds, and this group did not want to fight their mentors. So they retreated to remote regions, and had nothing to do with the muggle efforts to destroy the Fairy people. They kept good relations with the Fairies, and trade efforts helped keep both groups economies going, even after the fairy retreat underground. This relationship has been going ever since.
While the Fairies made up for their relative weakness with a steady advancement in technology, the wizards, or 'Mages', got to a level of tech similar to that of muggles in the 1800s, and then they stopped. This was because Human magic is so powerful it interferes with the operation of electrical devices. The fairies had designed their technology to work in areas of high magical output, through the use of plasma and energy transfer instead of electricity.
Mages and Fairies have cooperated on several projects, such as the area known as platform 9¾. This was originally a shuttle port, but when the Muggles built Kings Cross station on top of it during the 1800s the port was closed. The Mage education centre known as the Hogwarts School of witchcraft and wizardry was situated in Scotland, a fair distance from the main British mage population in London and its surrounds. The wizards commissioned a large steam engine and several carriages to transport the students and staff to the school. After several incidents involving muggle stowaways, it became obvious that a secret start point was needed to prevent more exposures. Fairy engineers reopened the shuttle port below King's Cross, and installed a train platform nearby. The entrance was concealed inside a column on the muggle platform. It is a door hidden behind a hologram that scans for registered Fairies and mages. If one is detected, it opens and admits them. The hologram is not deactivated, though. This can be quite disconcerting for people going through it for the first time. At one point a software error refused entry for two Hogwarts students, who were forced to seek alternative transport. The train, known as 'the Hogwarts express', was equipped with a cloaking device and runs on unused tracks which are magically modified to appear rotten and unsafe.
Five years after the software malfunction, LEP forces were mobilised to defend Hogwarts from a massive attack by the dark mage Voldemort and his army.